Contractors Assign Blame, but Admit No Faults of Their Own, in Health Site

Published: October 23, 2013

WASHINGTON — Contractors that built President Obama’s health insurance marketplace point fingers at one another and at the government, but each insists that it is not responsible for the problems that infuriated millions of Americans trying to buy insurance on the Web site, according to testimony prepared for a Congressional hearing on Thursday.

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Some of the biggest contractors set forth their experiences in testimony for the hearing, by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Cheryl R. Campbell, a senior vice president of CGI Federal, a unit of the CGI Group, the main contractor, said all of its work had been done “under the direction and supervision” of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which she said was responsible for the performance of the federal exchange.

“We acknowledge that issues arising in the federal exchange have made the process for selecting and enrolling in qualified insurance plans difficult to navigate for too many individuals,” Ms. Campbell said. “Unfortunately, in systems this complex with so many concurrent users, it is not unusual to discover problems that need to be addressed once the software goes into a live production environment.”

She said CGI had won the contract for the federal exchange through a two-step process of “full and open competition.”

She blamed “another contractor” for problems that consumers have had creating secure password-protected accounts. She did not name the company, but government records show it is Quality Software Services Inc., a unit of the UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest insurers.

These problems “created a bottleneck that prevented the vast majority of users” from gaining access to the federal exchange, Ms. Campbell said.

The federal exchange, she said, is “not a standard consumer Web site,” but “a complex transaction processor” that must simultaneously help millions of Americans shop for insurance and enroll in health plans. It must communicate instantaneously with computer systems developed by other contractors and with databases of numerous federal agencies and more than 170 insurance carriers qualified to do business in the 36 states where the federal marketplace operates, she said.

Andrew M. Slavitt, the UnitedHealth executive responsible for Quality Software Services, said its identity verification tool was just one part of “the federal marketplace’s registration and access management system, which involves multiple vendors and pieces of technology.”

These were overwhelmed by people trying to use the site, Mr. Slavitt said. One reason for the logjam, he suggested, is that the administration made “a late decision requiring consumers to register for an account before they could browse for insurance products.”

Mr. Slavitt said that Quality Software Services was one of several companies that tested the federal marketplace before it opened.

“In our role as tester,” he said, “we were tasked with identifying errors in code that was provided to us by others.” The results were reported back to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the relevant contractor, “who in turn was responsible for fixing coding errors or making any necessary changes,” he said.

John Lau, a program director for Serco, another contractor, said his company was seeing an increase in paper applications. Serco is supposed to enter data from those applications in the government’s computerized eligibility system, but problems in that system have created challenges for Serco, as they have for consumers, Mr. Lau said.

The same contractors, testifying before the same committee on Sept. 10, assured lawmakers that they were ready to handle a surge of users when the federal exchange opened on Oct. 1.

Trying to catch up with problems still plaguing the federal exchange, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, and Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, met at the White House on Wednesday with top executives from insurance companies, including Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, WellPoint and several Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans.

The White House said technology experts from government and industry were working together “to iron out kinks” that had provided insurers with incomplete and inaccurate information about people trying to enroll.

A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2013, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Contractors Assign Blame, but Admit No Faults of Their Own, in Health Site.